


the answer is time

by mornen



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Drama, Estel, Gap Filler, Grief, Hope, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Love, Mortality, Other, Pain, Philosophy, Post-Quest, Rule Breakers, Scars, Shooting Stars, Star Gazing, Time - Freeform, sisu - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29064093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mornen/pseuds/mornen
Summary: Legolas asks Gimli to cross the sea with him.***Gimli finds himself laughing, and the laugh is like an echo of his mother’s laugh when he told her he would fight a dragon with his bare hands if he had to. He’s old enough to know that such things are foolish things to say, but still are true. Anyone might fight a dragon with their bare hands if they had to. There’s just not much chance at making it out alive.
Relationships: Gimli (Son of Glóin)/Legolas Greenleaf
Comments: 10
Kudos: 43
Collections: Tolkien Secret Santa 2020





	the answer is time

_This thing all things devours;_   
_Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;_   
_Gnaws iron, bites steel;_   
_Grinds hard stones to meal;_   
_Slays king, ruins town,_   
_And beats mountain down._

  
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

* * *

Legolas’s knees are painted green from the grass when he comes back from the moss-grown groves of silver trees. The sky is lit with stars, and there is no other light, for the moon will not rise, and they have made no fire. Still Gimli can see the green on his skin, when Legolas sits beside him and rests his arms around his legs, draws his knees up to his chin.

‘What did you find?’ Gimli asks. He did not go this time because Legolas runs too far into the forest, and it becomes dark and terrible, like the stories that Glóin told Gimli of his near death in Mirkwood when he returned from his adventure with many riches, and many deep wounds, but finally a real home for them. He spoke very quietly of the quest every time that he did. And some part of Gimli was glad that he had not been allowed to go, but most of him wished he had gone, so he could spare his father at least some of the pain.

‘Many things,’ Legolas answers, because elves answer questions vaguely far more often than they answer anything plainly. He sits up straight to undo the braids tying back his hair. He brushes his hair out with his fingers and slides off his moccasins and then hugs his knees again. The night air is still warm.

Gimli sits with his back to a large tree that grows thirty feet into the air before the first branches appear. It stands apart from the rest of the trees, in this small clearing, beside a swift running stream, that they have made a camp at for two days. They will leave soon.

Fireflies blink on and off in the grass and air. Some land on Legolas’s hair and light the strands gold. Gimli stares at the stars. The wood feels soft against his back. Dry moss grows up the side of the tree.

They do not light a fire. It is summer, and they will not burn wood in this forest, away from everyone else, in the realm of the trees. It will not grow cold enough to bother them, and the world will remain dark shadows and deep blue.

Legolas’s fingers dance over his bruised legs. He wipes at the grass stains for a moment and then forgets about them.

‘I want,’ he says, vaguely, softly, his hazel eyes narrowed as he searches for the words he means. He runs his hand through his hair, now loose, and a mess. He bites his lip. His breath comes out in a little frustrated sigh. ‘Mmm.’

Gimli looks away from him because Legolas often finds it easier to talk when he isn’t being looked at. Gimli learned that about him years ago. He’s known him for years. It seems strange, for it feels long to him, but it must be a flash of a second in an elf’s life. A beautiful moment that will be gone the next time Legolas looks up to find nothing but an empty shadow where Gimli once was. And nothing left of him but memories and some bones hidden somewhere that will be forgotten once enough years have passed, and still, won’t that be just a moment, just a year, to an elf?

The stars are spilled across the velvet sky. One comes from nowhere, slips across the sky, and disappears in a flash. And isn’t that a mortal to an elf? The flash of a shooting star gone in a brilliant second next to the vast spread of the eternal stars that rise faithfully year after year, unchanged, as the world spins and changes beneath him.

Still won’t he have loved him? Won’t he miss him? Or will he be a moment gone that is just a soft sadness in Legolas’s voice when he says his name (his names) until they fade away, forgotten as life goes on beyond the sea in a place that Legolas will run to and Gimli will never see?

He guesses what he is asking is: does Legolas love him? Love him as more than a curiosity, something that was interesting and may remain interesting to death, but what beyond that? Is this why mortals and elves don’t meddle with one another? Because it is certain to end in a way that leaves one of them living with a memory that the best they can do is try to forget? Because there is no other answer to this? Because they can’t bear the ending of it all?

Is this what grief is before the pain has happened?

Gimli’s throat is tight. He touches the moss beside him. It is dry and deep. He does not press his finger into it, deep enough to hurt it. He sits and watches the stars, afraid to blink for the tears that will fall down his face, or the shooting stars he will miss. If he cries now, Legolas will ask him what is wrong, and he does not want to answer. Because there is no possible answer that would make him feel all right, let alone better.

Either he is a passing interest that Legolas will love momentarily and then move on from when his death comes, as death always comes for those that are mortal. Or he will be a love that stains Legolas’s heart forever when he dies, as he must die, and Legolas’s grief is an ache inside of him with nothing to comfort him. For there will be no one else to speak of Gimli to, no one else who will remember him, except, maybe if Gandalf or Elrond or Galadriel have cared enough of Gimli to remember him. And still then, the world will go on, and Legolas will live, and the stars will slowly shift and change, and the world will become something entirely different, and the grief may fade at times, but it will always come back, a terrible pain as bad as the first moment, as grief does.

‘Time,’ Legolas says, suddenly. His voice is sharper than it usually is, but the sharpness breaks as he continues. ‘I want more time.’

‘Mmm,’ Gimli says. He does too, but he can’t say it out loud, not now. Not in the dark, watching the stars, waiting for Legolas to whisper the answers to questions that he dares not ask.

‘I’ll write your name on my wrist,’ Legolas says. ‘I’ll write your name.’

But that will just be his name, not forgotten then, at least until the ink fades.

‘Gimli, Gimli,’ Legolas says. ‘I don’t want to leave you. But my heart is aching for the sea, and to leave this land. When Aragorn dies, I don’t want to stay. For all of it will be touched by grief, and I won’t be able to… I can’t get rid of it, Gimli. None of it. It isn’t fair. I miss everyone, all the time. But no one is ever together. Not everyone. Everyone… Why is it unfair? Why does it hurt? Gimli, is love supposed to hurt like this? Is it supposed to follow you, asking for your every drop of life? Stretching you out, pinning you to points on a map that you can’t reach, not at once, not at once, not at all?’ Legolas’s voice shakes, and the words all come out together, fast, so desperate, without an answer that Gimli knows.

‘It’s so long ago that I was young,’ Legolas says. His eyes are wide and tremble with starlight. ‘But it was only yesterday. I didn’t know anything before the quest, Gimli. What did I know but how to run in the shadows and find the sky where the branches wouldn’t cover, to watch the starlight, to dance and to sing, to hunt, to fear the creeping evil of the forest, but I didn’t know anything. I thought I did. I did. I thought I understood pain, Gimli. I thought I understood what it is to be faced with death and questions that I haven’t any answers for. But all of it was nothing. It was nothing.

'Because this is where it aches. This is where I grieve. It’s in my heart. I understand now how Elrond wept at the end. It’s all so much, Gimli. I could die. I could really die. Because it hurts, it hurts. It hurts, and I don’t know any words of comfort. Have any ever been written? Do you know? Do you know of any words that I haven’t heard? Something that will give us something that isn’t pain?’

Legolas cries. He cries so openly, not hiding his feelings, the deepness of his grief. He hands Gimli his trembling heart, coming apart, and asks him to fix it.

Gimli rests his hand on Legolas’s hand. It is true then, that he was younger in many ways than Gimli was when they set out on the quest. Legolas who laughed and called them children, though he had barely been outside of his home. Five hundred years means nothing. Or was it all a jest?

Legolas wraps his arms around Gimli’s shoulders. His tears wet his shirt. Gimli strokes his loose hair. It’s true. They’re running out of time. The grains of sand slip faster through the hourglass. Soon there will be none left on the top, and the bottom of the hourglass will be too full, too heavy, to ever flip again.

Still, there is some comfort in this pain. That at least, at least, he knows for sure that he isn’t just a passing whim that Legolas found fascinating like he might a tree, a leaf, he does not recognise.

‘I hate it,’ Legolas says. ‘I hate it. I hate it. You will come with me, promise? You will come?’

‘Come where?’ Gimli says. He tilts Legolas’s chin up. His face is wet with his tears. His hair is starting to tangle. A firefly nests in a wave of his hair. It blinks on and off, faintly green.

‘Across the sea.’

Gimli brushes Legolas’s tears away.

‘What ship would take me?’ he asks, and the memory of Galadriel’s words is faint in his ears. She was also an exile, though she chose the exile willingly, both times. He still doesn’t know why, if she longed so for her home that she created it again, as best she could. But maybe she was younger then, and hadn’t known how much the pain would grow. Maybe elves take forever to grow. They don’t have to push themselves when they have all the time in the world.

‘A ship I make,’ Legolas says, like he’s talking of whittling a toy, just as easy as all that. ‘A ship for us. I will take you with me, or I will not go. And if we drown in the deep salt sea, then we will drown together. I will take death with you, or life with you, but I won’t take either without you.’

Gimli finds himself laughing, and the laugh is like an echo of his mother’s laugh when he told her he would fight a dragon with his bare hands if he had to. He’s old enough to know that such things are foolish things to say, but still are true. Anyone might fight a dragon with their bare hands if they had to. There’s just not much chance at making it out alive.

‘Oh, don’t laugh at me,’ Legolas says, and his voice is so suddenly clear that Gimli knows without a doubt that he’s serious.

Gimli traces a white scar that runs across Legolas’s cheek. He saw Legolas get it, and he cut down the orc who gave it to him. And that was long ago, and only yesterday.

‘I mean it,’ Legolas says. ‘I will build a ship, and together we will reach the Undying Lands, or together we will drown. But there is no world in which I part from you without at least trying. You saved the world. Who are they to turn you aside? There is no truth in what they say: that mortals are unholy, unhallowed, unbeautiful, undeserving. If they want to cry that you aren’t allowed, I’ll fight them all, every one. There is still hope, as long as we draw breath, dear Gimli.’

Gimli smiles softly. He rests Legolas’s head against his shoulder, his arm around him. The stars glitter in the heavens, beautiful, enduring.

‘We don’t listen to the rules, do we, Legolas?’ he says.

Legolas smiles.

‘Never.’

**Author's Note:**

> totally forgot to post this on here last month


End file.
